Page 53 of Planet Zero
“Are you alright?” Without thinking, she reached and touched his hand, as she did with Oh’na, as she had done with Hunlath. But he wasn’t either. Their skin-on-skin contact shocked her like an electrical current. She kept her hand on his for a few seconds before removing it. Her fingers tingled as if singed.
He showed no reaction to their touch. “I am as expected. I am only thankful that my strength held up against the Wrennlin. That I was enough.”
Frowning slightly, he handed her the grass.
She stared at the dry, dirty yellow blades of leaves on bulbous stalks. They reminded her of silk flowers that had sat in the sun too long. “Timpho grass?”
“Should be enough for a couple of days, no?”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
Their eyes connected. “You don’t know?”
“I guess not.”
“They didn’t tell you?”
“They?”
“Your women.”
“Tell me what? I can’t eat it, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
He cocked his head, animal-like. “Shenever toldthem.”
“She?”
“Samantha.”
The name hung between them, separating them yet inexplicably bringing them closer.
“The one I remind you of?” Addie asked.
He reached out and touched one of Addie’s tightly coiled curls before dropping his hand. “She was small-statured, like you, with long pale hair. A fragile little thing with tinkling laughter and sad blue eyes.”
Addie couldn’t breathe for the intensity of the moment. Or maybe it was her ribs.
“Is this how you see me?” Addie’s hair was light auburn and very curly, and her eyes were green, so it wasn’t her coloring that brought Samantha to his mind.
He chuckled. “No. Your eyes aren’t sad. And you’re strong. She’d never been one for strength.”
His words shocked Addie. “Strong? Me? I’m the perpetually helpless one around here. I’m scared witless of everything and everyone. I’m only as physically strong as a For toddler, and I know it. It’s an unpleasant feeling, Zoark.”
“It isn’t the physical strength I am talking about. Nor a healthy fear of the dangers of our land. You are not afraid to die, and you are not afraid to live. No, you are not like Samantha. Now, here’s your grass.”
He took out his knife and sliced one of the bulging bulbs puckering the stem. Clear juice sprayed out, catching Addie in the face. Astonished, she licked the drops from her lips tasting… water.
“What trick is this?” She refused to believe what she saw and felt and tasted. “Timpho grass?”
He started to methodically prick the bulbs, pouring the juice into his large cupped hand, filling it up, overflowing.
He raised his hand to her face and pushed her head down to it with his other hand. “Drink.”
Addie frantically dipped her head, anxious to try this magical, unexpected gift. The clear juice, with a hint of a grassy mineral taste to it, was the closest thing to water she had tasted on this planet. So close that Addie moaned, tears rushing to her eyes. It was heaven. It was a vivid, powerful reminder of home, a punch to the gut.
She raised her eyes to catch a blurry image of Zoark’s face, and couldn't read his shuttered expression. Unraveling at the seams, she awkwardly slurped the last of the juice from his hand and choked.
Coughing to clear her airways was a different kind of torture, her chest engulfed in pain with every contraction.
